Designing Content Authoring Experiences

At Confab 2020, Laura Robertson took the main stage and asked if she could take a poll. “Raise your hand if you love your content management system.” The entire room went silent.

The thing is, in most of these cases, people weren’t complaining about their CMS. They were complaining about custom functionality that doesn’t fit in with the way people actually work. They were complaining about opaque business requirements sent down from on high with no explanation or consideration for the people who have to enter content into these products. They were complaining about being disenfranchised from the very system they are expected to use day in and day out.

In most content projects, the needs of authors are barely taken into consideration, and this is incredibly frustrating. You would think that when you spend millions of dollars on a project, you would prioritize creating a system that people actually want to enter content into as opposed to one that fills them with dread when they open it up.

In this session I'll discuss why the authoring experience (AX) deserves to be a first-class citizen alongside UX and DX, and the steps we can take as contributors to help make that happen in Drupal core as well as the client projects we work on.